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Long Shadows of a Borough’s Boogeyman

In “Cropsey” Barbara Brancaccio and Josh Zeman explore the disappearances of five Staten Island children in the ’70s and ’80s.Credit
Chad Davidson

COUPLES do all sorts of things on first dates. Coffee. Dinner. Dancing. Or strolling around the grounds of the abandoned Willowbrook mental institution on Staten Island. Josh Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio chose to take the walk. The outcome was a movie.

“Cropsey,” named for the mythic boogeyman of Hudson Valley campfire stories, is the cinematic version of peeking under the bed and not breathing a sigh of relief. Two parts true crime and one part folklore, the documentary examines a string of child disappearances on Staten Island during the ’70s and ’80s, including two for which the onetime Willowbrook worker Andre Rand is serving time.

Mr. Zeman and Ms. Brancaccio, who dated for a time after that initial stroll through the haunted landscape of their Staten Island youth — where one child’s body was literally buried — spent nearly a decade of nights and weekends investigating the cases against Mr. Rand; the other, seemingly unrelated disappearances; and the history and character of the borough. But they also wound up examining the controlling nature of narrative.

“ ‘Cropsey’ is really a movie about storytelling,” Ms. Brancaccio said. “It’s about a small-town location, a series of unfortunate events that affects the entire community and what they told themselves about it. By the time we get to court and see the outcome, I think it’s not even relevant. The people had determined what the story of the missing children was, and it had become a part of their own mythology.”

It’s a mythology sparked by the collision of urban legend and urban nightmare: missing children; a perpetrator who could have come from Central Casting (and is suspected in the other disappearances); and the location itself, Willowbrook, on the fringe of the island’s Greenbelt, which had warehoused the city’s mentally ill under disgraceful conditions. For children growing up around the shuttered institution it was synonymous with horror.

As a result, that “Cropsey” is being shown at the College of Staten Island on June 5, as part of the Staten Island Film Festival has taken on a perhaps inflated significance: the college is on the grounds of the old Willowbrook State School. (The film will also be shown on video on demand July 2; opens theatrically June 4 at the IFC Center in Manhattan; and will be broadcast on Investigation Discovery Aug. 13.) Add all the unresolved aspects of the case, and what might have been a straight crime story is now something more volatile.

“The facts don’t reveal the truth, is the problem,” said Mr. Zeman, who during the years of making “Cropsey” was co-producing indie films like “The Station Agent,”“Mysterious Skin” and “Choking Man,” as well as writing screenplays. “And I think the only way we’ll ever know the truth is if he tells us, which was our goal.” (He and Ms. Brancaccio never did get an on-camera interview with Mr. Rand, although he communicated with them by letter from prison in Ossining, N.Y., proclaiming his innocence.)

Mr. Rand had, after all, become the real-life Cropsey of nightmares — the fictional drooling, child-napping maniac — on the grounds of Willowbrook, the institution where he once worked. Only one of the five children whose disappearances are addressed in the movie was ever found: 12-year-old Jennifer Schweiger, a girl with Down syndrome, whose body was unearthed in 1987. (Mr. Rand was convicted of her kidnapping.) The others simply vanished. While there was never any physical evidence against Mr. Rand, the filmmakers do not suggest he is innocent. But they became fascinated with the way stories develop, evolve and, perhaps, dictate reality.

Mr. Zeman and Ms. Brancaccio, a deputy commissioner of the New York City Human Resources Administration, have found supporters of their film. “I think it’s done very well, and I think it tells the truth,” said Donna Cutugno, a Staten Islander who founded the volunteer search group Friends of Jennifer for Missing Children during the Schweiger case. “We still have those other missing children. The boogeyman wasn’t a myth.”

There are also critics. The brothers of Holly Ann Hughes, the second girl Mr. Rand is convicted of kidnapping, are boycotting the movie and are opposed to its screening at the College of Staten Island.

Reached by phone, Sean Hughes said he had not seen the film and did not want to make a statement but made reference to a “Blair Witch”-style sensationalism he thought the film was trying to generate. It’s a perception abetted by horror fans online, who have found in “Cropsey” a documentary all their own.

“I think it’s ‘Blair Witch’ backwards,” Devin Faraci, a writer for the horror Web site chud.com, said via e-mail. “You create a scenario where people assume it’s fake, because we’ve seen so many faux docs/found-footage films in the horror genre, and then you blow their minds with ‘It’s all true!!!’ ” Mr. Faraci’s problem with the film, echoed elsewhere online, is that there’s no “payoff” or “money shot” — no easy resolution — which is somewhat like complaining that there are no space aliens in “Robin Hood.” The appeal of “Cropsey” to a horror audience has left the filmmakers slightly chagrined.

“We sat with this family when no one else showed up in court,” Ms. Brancaccio said, referring to the prolonged pretrial motions that preceded Mr. Rand’s conviction for the Hughes kidnapping. “So they’ve seen us several times a year for the last 10 years. They know there’s no malice here. I don’t think they want to bring it back up, but there’s nothing happening here in this film that takes away from their loss.”

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Ms. Cutugno, who attended the “Cropsey” premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival last year, agreed. “I never got the reason they don’t want it shown at Willowbrook,” she said of the Hughes family. “Jennifer was found there. The story began there. Andre Rand lived there. It’s not tall tales, it’s truth. Jennifer should be honored and remembered, and maybe some of the other kids in time can be found also. Never give up.”

The investigation they undertook, Ms. Brancaccio said, was like “peeling an onion,” as one interviewee led to another, and each person provided another version of the Rand tale. What’s reflected in the film is a specific time and a mood of fear that prevailed in the late ’80s. “The kids’ urban legends were about the escaped mental patients who lived in the woods with a hook for a hand,” Mr. Zeman said. “But the adult urban legends were about the ‘Satanic panic,’ devil worshiping, heavy mental music, child-pornography and child-slavery rings. There was this child-snatching hysteria and a convergence of fears that drove Staten Islanders into a frenzy.”

And as “Cropsey” takes pains to illustrate, Staten Island itself had already been victimized as a kind of dumping ground for New York City: its garbage was dumped there, its mentally ill were warehoused there, and the borough itself virtually was ignored. “It’s like nowhere else in the world,” Ms. Brancaccio said. “But when you’re not paying attention, bad things are going to happen.”

A version of this article appears in print on May 30, 2010, on Page AR13 of the New York edition with the headline: Long Shadows Of a Borough’s Boogeyman. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe